Developer InterviewsAllThingsAzeroth recently had the chance to interview Ghostcrawler. A summary of the main points is below, but listening to the full interview is worth it if you want to hear the full answers!

Cataclysm

Cataclysm didn't offer enough for players to do. There were some things for high end players in the harder raids, but otherwise there wasn't much to do. Mists of Pandaria was an attempt to correct that, with something to do for all players.

Cataclysm had separate zones, but Pandaria is a more of a place that you want to spend time in and explore. This makes for a much nicer environment this time around.

Future

The Bonus Roll has worked out well, other than the consolation loot (28g 50s "Fail Bag") that you get when you lose the roll. In the future it will have different rewards, such as bonus valor, more gold, gems, or rare chances at blue BoE gear, pets, or mounts.

There are no immediate plans to add Artifact quality items to the game. One idea that was discussed was making heroic raid gear a different color to make it stand out. This won't happen during Mists of Pandaria, but it is possible for the future.

Justice Points will hopefully be somewhat more useful in the future. There was an opportunity that may have been missed to use them to get item level 450 gear earlier in the expansion.

Transmog of legendary items is still under debate, but is somewhat likely for the future.

More players are expected to try Challenge Modes after they finish things they are working on now.

Ideally guilds that aren't able to finish every raid on heroic will still be able to finish one or two of the heroic raids in this tier. Upgrading gear and Sha-Touched gems should hopefully help with this.

Patch 5.2

A rough idea of how long patches will take: 2 months for a content patch and 4 months for a patch with a new raid and PvP season. This is just a rough target, as there are many factors involved in determining when players are ready and the content is ready.

Patch 5.2 will add some new architecture, geography, and a new story. A new raid is planned that will hopefully be similar in quality to Ulduar. There will also be more daily quests!

Patch 5.2 will bring more talent changes than Patch 5.1, but they will mostly be number tweaks. Rogue talents were mentioned as something that needs to be looked at.

Raids may not see progressive nerfs this time around, as there are multiple difficulties and catch up mechanisms. It is likely that raids will not get any easier until at least Patch 5.2.

Patch 5.2 might make the current Lesser Charms less valuable to discourage hoarding and the need to farm them before the patch.

One idea being considered is not allowing upgrades of Patch 5.2 gear until Patch 5.3.

Classes

Monks are likely the class that needs the most work right now. Mistweavers have been difficult to balance, work on that is still ongoing. Healing and DPS Monks are also underrepresented in PvP.

There are currently more Retribution Paladins than Rogues.

Misc

Balancing time spent between dungeons and raid development to satisfy everyone is difficult because of the diverse audience.

Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder are features that did good things for the game and are almost expected in some of the other MMOs now.

Ghostcrawler would personally like to add more of a social aspect to the game, where you would enter Stormwind and find more of a community, rather than everyone standing around at the Auction House.

Ghostcrawler doesn't know what Project Blackstone is.

Patch 5.1 Hotfixes - December 5

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Quests

It is now possible to use the Distraction ability while on the quest "Prisoners of War".

Safeguard will no longer sometimes take effect on allies that are out of line of sight, out of range, or unreachable.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Leveling SpeedExcept me. Maybe I'm slacking or maybe I'm tired of the pandaren lands.
Not everyone. Some are taking the phrase, "slow down" to heart and focusing on more things than just getting to max level. What's most important is that you take time to enjoy the experiences for what they are. The game isn't going anywhere so taking a little down time now and then isn't a bad thing. Everyone levels at their own pace. I personally tend to level a bit at a time, go do some other things (like pet battles, or professions, achievement hunting), and then go back to it later.

It's the thing I enjoy most about World of Warcraft is that there is so much variety that I can choose to do something else for a bit if I start to feel "burn out" on whatever it is I'm currently focused on. I've never been the type that can just "grind out" one aspect from start to finish. I have to sort of sample things as a go.

Curious--do you guys keep stats on this kind of stuff? I've heard the occasional story of someone taking 4-5 months to hit max level, but I've always wondered how common this approach to the game is.
Sure, we keep track of how many have reached max and when. It's not anything we share publicly though. I've known some that will take a year or more to reach maximum level because they play so minimally. Everyone has their own pace that feels right to them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP and MMR FeedbackSo, #1, MMR is still not reset.
Ghostcrawler already mentioned on his Twitter account back when this was a major topic of discussion that resetting the MMR of players creates a large sum of unbalanced matches until the ratings return to their original values. So the resetting of MMR actually creates a few weeks of pain with very little gain, given that most players will end up at approximately the same MMR that they were before the reset. You can see his tweet about this, here: https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...81281304072194

We have also implemented, with patch 5.1, a new system that is designed to prevent players from camping high ratings as well. This should alleviate some concerns with players reaching high ratings through their MMR and then camping those ratings, they will end up losing their ranking because those who continue to play and perform well in their matches should progress past them. You can read more on this system in the PvP blog here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/6415071

On to #2, they did fix BM hunters, but they didn't fix warriors, AND, as it turned out, the list was missing warlocks, who can one-shot people as well, and maybe mages
We made changes to the Warrior class by lowering the maximum stacks of Taste for Blood to three in PvP. We also recently hotfixed Demonology Warlocks, lowering the demonic fury cost and damage of Chaos Wave by 33%. Mages also received several changes in patch 5.1, they are too numerous to mention here so I recommend checking the patch notes out: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/6617095

AND they gave everyone more PVP power without giving more PVP resilience making one-shots significantly more often than before.
We are also keeping an eye on the increase in damage that occurred due to heightened PvP power. It is possible that we will up base resilience or do something similar to compensate for this change, but we feel that more time is required to observe the effects of this change in order to make a decision on the matter.

Nice progress... Can anyone honestly say that PVP got better since the beginning of the season? Because I don't.
We know that PvP will never be a perfect picture of balance where both teams in every match up will walk into the arena, or even a rated battleground with a 50% chance of winning or losing. We do feel that it is achievable to a point where players can have fun and feel that a match was fair and they understand why and where in the fight they lost. We are not blinded by rose-tinted glasses mind you, we know that we are not at this point yet in Mists of Pandaria and there is still some work to go until we reach that level of balance.

To achieve this is very hard to do, especially when you remember that the game is constantly evolving and new classes, abilities and mechanics are being created. This is not us trying to make excuses mind you, it's hard, but we want to and owe it to you as the players to try our best to get this right. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

And if so, are there any future changes to make those less-popular talents more competitive?
Yes, we monitor them and yes we'll look at the less popular ones. Consider some are fine but narrow situations etc. (Source)

any chance youre going to buff hunter in terms of PVE(especially MM),since we as pure DPS class cant compete even with hybrid?
Can you provide specific examples where a hybrid is beating you for us to look at? (Hint: top 100 tends to measure luck.) (Source)Do you want us to provide anecdotal evidence? That seems more unreliable than the top 100 parses.
Just saying that top 100 can measure skill or just who managed to get a lot of crits. Looking at all parses can be better. (Source)aren't those top parses filled with players ignoring mechanics, being fed tricks etc, old tier set abuses.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot of detective work to tell. Best source are logs from reliable raiders, but I know not all are public. (Source)

Do you feel that MM has unique utility? Maybe make the old Glyph of Conc Shot a MM passive? I feel that the spec lacks util.
Not a huge fan of unique utility for DPS specs in the same class. Feel like the raid makes the choice of spec, not you. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Why can't I Disengage uphill?
The game does a lot of LOS checks on terrain changes, partially to prevent exploits. Not ideal but probably unavoidable. (Source)

No. We are just tired of you being really smug, and taking pvp way too lightly, You ruined beast wrath in PTR. It's stupid.
A lot of players were complaining about BM hunters. I don't think it's fair to call us smug because we nerfed them. (Source)

Skill cap has been a huge challenge for us in PvP. Take hunters; historically weak at the low end and strong as the high end. (Source)

Speaking of bugs, any word on fixing Powershot bug? Such a fun ability but doesn't work half the time
Keep hearing that but it doesn't repro easily. Does it ever happen on target dummies who don't move?On Dummies it looks like it hits 100% of the time, but actual players that's another story.
It is a "skill shot" (like Divine Star) so it can miss targets that move. That may be what players are seeing. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Gag Order pvp was available to all specs in Cata with pummel on a lower CD, yet warriors were crap. Control is not the issue.
Felt that we took away too much mobility from warriors at the end of 4 and we really want that to be one of their strengths. (Source)

any chance we will see stat scaling on 1h's for us smf warrs? To make up for the stat loss of skipping TG?
We balance SMF around the lower stats on the 1H weapons. That's why the bonuses are so high. (Source)

Still no Fury PvP Buff?
Which means we'd have to give Fury some utility or control that Arms lacks, which as I said recently, we're reluctant to do. As far as your original question, it's hard to buff SMF for PvP because the attacks are so small compared to Arms. (Source)

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